Early next year Japan will commemorate the tenth anniversary of the tsunami that claimed more than 10,000 souls. Most of the victims were drowned by a wall of water which rose to more than 100ft in height and travelled up to six miles inland.
A few days after the tsunami struck I arrived to report on the disaster and saw what those numbers meant in reality. I was with a camera crew, driving in the gloom through one ruined town. We turned a corner to find the road blocked by a trawler in the middle of the carriageway. Utterly surreal.
At 9.1 on the Richter Scale, it was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, or at least since records began in 1900. The aftershocks went on for days and were strong enough to make for sleepless nights in our hotel. After a few days the focus of the story shifted, as one catastrophe begat another. The terrifying seismological war dance was the work of Mother Nature. But the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima which followed was wholly man-made.
Much has been written over the decades about how Japan’s collective psychology has been shaped by the threat that comes from being islanders on the edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire. And being the only nation to see thousands of lives snuffed out in an instant by atomic weapons. But the disaster of 2011 must still have undermined a growing belief that technological innovation – at which Japan has so excelled – could banish mass fatality events.
The terrifying seismological war dance was the work of Mother Nature. But the nuclear reactor meltdown at Fukushima which followed was wholly man-made.
Japan, after all, had one of the most sophisticated tsunami early-warning systems in the world. Many thousands fled to the safety of higher ground, but hundreds still died in shelters that were washed away. The nuclear plant, with its sea-wall built to withstand “one-in-a-thousand year” waves, was inundated with water. The emergency generators were swamped and failed to keep the reactor core cool. Only Chernobyl has produced a bigger leak of radiation.
I thought about some of this as I talked with three of my daughters about their love, a love bordering on obsession, with Japanese “anime”. It’s a type of animated manga for TV. Simple, stylised, rudimentary animated cartoon drawings, a world away from the CGI-wizardry of modern Hollywood.
My girls love one show in particular. Attack on Titan is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have lived precariously since the mysterious arrival a century earlier of the eponymous Titans; giant humanoids who lumber around slowly but irresistibly. They seem to have one purpose – to eat people, usually with an unsettling rictus grin on their faces.
They don’t see Attack on Titans’ depiction of a dystopian world where life hangs by a thread.
The setting for this strangely compelling drama appears to be European and medieval, although some of the weaponry seems more modern. Crucially, that weaponry is wielded by teenage combatants. You probably haven’t heard of Eren Jaeger, Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert. But, if you have secondary-school-aged children or grandchildren, they will have.
I asked my teens what it was about the show that had turned it into what the Guardian described in 2014 as a “global phenomenon”. “It’s the range,” said Gwen (14). “And because it’s Japanese it’s just different. It’s a way of seeing the world in a different way.” Constance (16) threw in this: “It’s got depth. You get to like a character, who then gets killed off. It’s not sentimental.” Agnes (17) says it shows human frailty “in a way a show from the UK or US never would”.
So devoted to Attack on Titan are my daughters that they won’t wait for a new carefully-dubbed series to appear on Netflix. They go scouring the internet to watch it with English subtitles first.
They don’t extrapolate hidden meanings. They don’t see Attack on Titan’s depiction of a dystopian world where life hangs by a thread, as something almost peculiarly Japanese. They don’t see anime and manga as a by-product of a culture which seems to be (understandably) on edge and braced for the next calamity. They simply see teenagers, of indeterminate ethnicity, leading a fightback against monolithic, expressionless giants.
Put that way you can see, perhaps, why the Chinese government banned it from being shown there in 2015. The authorities said it was the “gore”. Something none of my girls mentioned.
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